EDHEC Business School, Nice : Kazuma Yoshida

Nice, in the final months—a city that shaped me as much as it taught me.

Ten months ago, I left Tokyo for Nice with a specific goal: to deepen my expertise in investment practice, supported by rigorous academic training rather than experience alone. Through NUCB Business School's double-degree partnership, I chose EDHEC Business School, a Grande École ranked 5th in the world for Masters in Finance by the Financial Times in 2026, among seventy institutions worldwide. It was a chance to test myself at one of finance's more demanding addresses, and looking back, it delivered on that.

Inside the Programme

EDHEC's Master in Finance is not one programme but a family of specialised tracks, and I followed Corporate Finance & Banking, built around capital structure, M&A, and investment decision-making. Most of my classmates were there with a clear target: a career at a top-tier investment bank, and grades carry real weight toward that. The result is genuine competition. Assessment splits between closed-book exams and group projects, and neither is forgiving.

What surprised me was how rarely that competitiveness turned adversarial. Inside each group, the norm was to pull each other up rather than compete internally, so the same intensity that made exams stressful also produced some of the closest working relationships of the year.

The first semester, September to December, laid the technical groundwork in corporate finance, M&A, and modelling; the second, January to May, moved into electives, where each of us sharpened a more specific direction.

Two pieces of that coursework stayed with me longer than the rest.

A Thesis on What Accounting Misses

The thesis my team and I built started from a simple observation: when a company invests in its people, its brand, or its own capabilities, standard accounting treats that spending as a cost rather than an investment. Over time, this quietly understates the real worth of exactly the kind of knowledge-driven, platform businesses that increasingly define modern industry.

Working through several decades of US corporate data, we built a model that treats these investments as what they actually are: assets that accumulate over time, and came away with a sharper, more honest way of seeing where value sits inside a company. It is a lens I expect to carry directly into how I evaluate investments going forward.

Learning to See the Value a Spreadsheet Misses

The second was a course on Real Options—the idea that the flexibility to wait, expand, or exit a decision carries value in itself—which reframes how decisions get made under genuine uncertainty. Conventional analysis tends to force a single, static bet on the future; Real Options instead asks how a decision can be staged, reversed, or expanded as new information comes in. It is a subtle shift, but one that changed how I think about any investment whose future isn't yet knowable.

The idea stuck enough that I am now working with one of my professors on a practical guide for applying it within Japanese corporate decision-making, a small, concrete way of bringing the learning home.

A European Lens

One thing that stood out beyond the coursework was a difference in starting assumptions. Shareholder value (maximising returns to shareholders) and stakeholder value (maximising value across a broader set of stakeholders) are both internally coherent theories of what a company is for. While stakeholder theory has American academic roots, its regulatory push—and the ESG movement it helped spawn—has largely come from Europe, though it has seen pushback more recently.

EDHEC let me examine both from two angles at once: academic faculty and practitioners teaching side by side. What struck me most was a kind of intellectual honesty in the effort itself, a real attempt to reach for universal principles, backed by a governance instinct that resists dogma and keeps asking hard questions rather than settling for easy answers.

Running that discussion in parallel with the hard, quantitative side of finance was, in its own way, one of the more interesting tensions of the year.

What my EMBA Prepared Me For

Before EDHEC, a year in our EMBA programme had already trained a particular discipline through its case method: read a case deeply enough to hold several angles on it at once, walk into the room having thought it through from more than one side, then listen closely for where the discussion actually needs help—a missing perspective, a point worth pushing back on, a thread worth building.

It is not about arguing a fixed position; it is about being ready to contribute constructively to wherever the room ends up.

In a classroom of more than twenty nationalities, most with prior banking or consulting experience, that flexibility mattered more than any single opinion I brought in. The habit my school had already built in me—showing up prepared to listen and adapt, not to win an argument—turned out to be more than enough to hold my own here and gave me a genuine footing from day one.

Coming Home

I returned to Tokyo in June 2026.

Looking back at the full arc of the programme, what stays with me most isn't any single course but the cumulative effect of being consistently out of my depth, in the best sense, surrounded by classmates and material that never let a question go unexamined.

The running continued throughout, a small constant against a demanding year and something I'm glad to have kept up as I return to work.

The thesis is complete.

The next chapter starts back in Tokyo.